Wayne Starks speaks into the phone in calm, even tones, similar to those of an enlightened Zen monk or a patient kindergarten teacher. He sounds optimistic and content, and his politeness is immediately disarming. A voice like his should belong to someone with a carefree life, but as one of the 2,200 New York City tenants living with HIV/AIDS facing a potential rent hike, Starks’ life is anything but carefree.

Starks, a 46-year-old Brooklyn native, spent 15 years of his life driving a bus for the New York City Transit Authority and was diagnosed with HIV in 1986. After injuring his Achilles’ tendon and losing the use of 40 percent of his foot in the mid-’90s, Starks says he could no longer work and began receiving his only source of income from Social Security Disability.

Starks, now living with AIDS, says he supports himself on just over $1,000 per month—with 30 percent of it going toward his monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “I pay 30 percent of my income,” Starks says. “I signed a contract for that.” The apartment is a type of non-emergency scatter-site housing funded by the New York City Human Resources Administration’s (HRA) HIV/AIDS Services Administration (HASA). As of October 2006, the HRA’s HASA had provided services for 44,629 New Yorkers. “It’s a very nice apartment,” Starks says. But the nice apartment Starks has come to call his home may soon be unaffordable.

One Saturday in October, Starks received a letter telling him that as of Nov. 1, he would have to pay 70 percent of his monthly income toward rent, leaving him with only $330 in cash each month. That letter came only two weeks before the rent hike deadline was to occur. Starks was devastated and had no idea how he would continue to pay his transportation, food and healthcare bills. While Medicaid pays for some of Starks’ health costs, it still does not cover all of his needs. “I’m an asthmatic, and when I need medicine for it, Medicaid won’t pay for it twice in one month.” Starks also pays extra to see a specialty doctor on Long Island about his muscle loss. “What they [Medicaid] don’t cover, I have to kick out myself,” Starks says.

Tenants like Starks were not the only people upset by the proposed rent hike. The New York City housing advocacy group, Housing Works, which specifically fights for the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS, immediately sprang into action, bringing the case to federal court. Housing Works successfully managed to convince a federal judge to postpone the rent hike for 45 days, but the threat of an increase still remains. “If this goes into effect,” Starks says, “I don’t know how I’ll survive.”

The story behind the proposed rent hike began in 2004, when New York state officials from the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA) completed an audit of HASA’s monthly spending in past years. The audit revealed some problems: HASA had not gone through the proper procedure to get payments for the city housing facilities and had placed a 30 percent of income cap on the rents of certain tenants, according to Bob Sharkey, OTDA’s director of policy development.

Another part of the problem, Sharkey says, was that the city was placing tenants, like Starks, who were living off of Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability payments, into the same category as tenants living off of public assistance, or Welfare. Under the New York State Social Services Law 131, Section (a), which deals with monthly grants and allowances for people living off of public assistance, a public assistance tenant with HIV/AIDS living in a one-person household must be left with only $330 in cash monthly; tenants living without HIV/AIDS are left with even less. “Typically, persons without AIDS only get to keep $193 per month,” Sharkey says. “The $330 is a special deal for New York City tenants living with AIDS.”

OTDA sent the city a notice about the problem in 2004, and the HRA and HASA began advocating against the proposed change in rent that same year. The city organizations tried convincing the state that the 30 percent of income rent cap needed to remain in place, as it had for the past decade. When the city established the cap in the ’90s, AIDS was still a relatively new disease, and New York City residents living with HIV/AIDS needed housing assistance. “People [in the HRA and HASA] were responding to what looked like an emergency,” says Barbara Brancaccio, the executive deputy commissioner for the HRA, speaking on behalf of Commissioner Verna Eggleston. “There were no guidelines in place to protect this particular population, so the HRA created them,” Brancaccio says.

Brancaccio says the state did not oppose the HRA’s rent cap initially, but after the audit came out, the state began to question its legality. The HRA’s period of advocacy against the cap’s removal ended in October 2006, after the state began withholding $150 million in reimbursable funds from the HRA, which left the organization in a bind. “They [the state] withheld funding until the HRA complied with the audit,” Brancaccio says. The HRA eventually had no choice but to announce the rent hike on Oct. 4.

Many protestors opposed to the hike have placed blame on Gov. George Pataki and OTDA for springing the rent hike shortly before it was slated to occur, but Sharkey says OTDA is not responsible for the timing because the city knew about the issue since 2004. “The city chose the time of the announcement,” Sharkey says. “This law has been in effect at least as long as I’ve been here—since 1977,” Sharkey says. “It’s not a political issue at all.”

Michael Hayes, spokesman for OTDA, agrees with Sharkey: “This predates Pataki, Cuomo.” Hayes denies that OTDA is specifically attacking the particular group of 2,200 tenants. “We would be in violation of the law if we did not follow the rule,” Hayes says, agreeing though that if advocacy groups like Housing Works convinced the state legislator to change the law, OTDA would abide by it.

Until then, OTDA will not be backing down from its current position. “If the city’s going to put the individuals into public assistance, they’ve got to follow the law,” Sharkey says.

But tenants still have a number of advocacy groups on their side. Michael Kink, a lawyer for Housing Works, is working hard to see to it that tenants like Starks will never have to reach the day when their basic survival comes under threat. “These people are vastly below the federal poverty line,” Kink says. “It [the hike] would basically double their rent.”

Kink says many of the tenants have families to support and that the rent hike would take away one-third or more of a person’s monthly SSI/SSD income. From Kink’s perspective, the blame for the hike varies depending on who is asked. “If you talk to the city, they say it’s the state’s fault. If you talk to the state, they say it’s the city’s fault,” Kink says.

But regardless of which organization is to blame for the rent hike, Kink says both are legally wrong. “The state and city need to comply with the federal law that places a 30 percent cap on rent.” According to Kink, the 30 percent cap appears among the rules and regulations followed by the Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS program, which subsidizes most of the housing units. The cap also appears among the rules that govern the McKinney-Vento homeless housing initiative—signed into law by President Ronald Reagan July 22, 1987—out of which the city funds some AIDS housing.

Kink says that by pressuring the city to remove the rent cap and leaving all of the tenants with only $330 in cash each month, the state has created an unfair situation. “The state is basically saying that everyone in the housing needs to be equally poor,” Kink says.

And as a city employee for 15 years, tenants like Starks do not see how it is fair to give all tenants the same monthly cash allowance. “I worked all my life, and the governor wants to make the playing board equal for everybody?” Starks says, his voice rising slightly. “The people who didn’t work get a little less than me, and I worked. Does that make a lot of sense?”

The final verdict in the rent hike case has yet to be determined, but the state’s Assembly Social Services Committee plans to hold a hearing about the issue in the next month in order to get statements from advocacy groups on the record. Deborah Glick, chair of Social Services, will lead the hearing, which will be attended by both city and state officials. Social Services decided to have the hearing after receiving numerous letters and phone calls from advocacy groups in support of the tenants. “We decided to give advocates a voice,” says Bethany Jankunis, spokeswoman for Glick’s New York City office. The hearing will be public, but the speakers are by invitation only.

In the meantime, Starks and his fellow tenants will continue to speak out and let the public know just how much the proposed hike could hurt them. “I’d have to live on $11 a day if it passes,” Starks says, and he will keep telling his story until the threat of that potential reality disappears.